Adventures in Baseball Archeology: the Negro Leagues, Latin American baseball, J-ball, the minors, the 19th century, and other hidden, overlooked, or unknown corners of baseball history...with occasional forays into other sports.

minor leagues

May 8, 2014

Odds are, any regular reader of this blog has already done this, but if you haven’t, you should immediately drop everything and make arrangements to obtain a copy ofOutsider Baseball: The Weird World of Hardball on the Fringe, 1876-1950, by Scott Simkus. Get it for your e-reader, or order it through your favorite online retailer, or (the best option) go to a bookstore and buy it off the shelf.

Clearly, as co-founder with Scott of the (late, lamented) Outsider Baseball Bulletin, I’m biased here. But who cares: this is baseball history written for the twenty-first century.

The phrase (and the book of course) is wholly Scott’s, but I think it’s fair to say that we developed the idea of “outsider baseball” together. It’s based on a simple set of observations. First: baseball was segregated until 1947 (and in truth it was still de facto segregated for a number of years after this). Most players of color were excluded from the major leagues. Second: the farther back you go in history, the freer the minor leagues were from interference by the majors. In other words, talent was less and less concentrated, and the better the minors were in relation to the majors. Third: before television and other mass entertainments and media took hold, a market niche existed for semiprofessional (or in some cases, fully professional) baseball at a local level—the city leagues, town teams, industrial leagues, and barnstorming curiosities like the House of David. Some of these teams were very good, as good as the top minor leagues, and featured many future or former major leaguers.

Put it all together, and you have a baseball world, prior to 1950, in which the major leagues contained much, much less of the available talent than they do now. If you buy Scott’s analysis, at various points before 1950 there was enough star power outside the National and American leagues to fully staff a third major league.

This is the backdrop, the theoretical basis, of Outsider Baseball. So how does Scott follow through? With an entertaining mix of storytelling, serious research, and some (fairly light) sabermetric analysis, a lot of it based on his vast collection of box scores involving outsider baseball teams. It’s a fun read, an introduction to the world outside the majors for the kind of people who read Bill James and Rob Neyer.

Scott looks at the truth behind legends. Did Cool Papa Bell really run the bases in 12 seconds flat? How many home runs did Josh Gibson really hit in his career? How good were those bearded House of David teams anyway? Could the Pittsburgh Crawfords have competed in the National League of the 1930s? Unless I missed it, there aren’t any impassioned arguments to put anybody in the Hall of Fame—but you’re introduced to plenty of people you’ve probably never heard of, and who are worth knowing about, people like Jimmy Clinton, Buck Lai, Eddie Gerner.

The book also digs up historical curiosities like the old “Field Day” events in which players competed in distance-throwing, base-running, and other track and field contests, and calculates how fast pre-radar gun pitchers might have been, based on how far they could throw.

It’s an engrossing treasure house of a book, one of those rare books you read and then think, “Well, that was too short.” It doesn’t exhaust its (many) subjects, not by a long shot. But if you want to know the direction in which baseball research is headed (at least the kind I do), there isn’t a better guide.

April 16, 2014

Cesar Sostre has written a couple of notes to me in response to my post about his father, Francisco Sostre, the 1940s pitcher:

“Thank you for writing that wonderful article on my father. I never saw my father pitch in his heyday since I was born in 1949, but I did see him pitch in the army when he was old and out of shape. He still had amazing ability and an imposing fork ball (split finger fastball in modern terminology). I inherited some of his baseball genes, having a brief baseball career in the San Francisco Giants organization in the late sixties. I was also a pitcher. The street named Francisco Sostre in Yabucoa was named after his father (my great grandfather), who was mayor of Yabucoa. Thanks again for the article.”

*******

“I was amazed at the accuracy of your article—congratulations. By the way, you were correct in surmising that my father was white. In those days, Hispanics and Blacks were all considered black. My father played with many black players in the Puerto Rican winter league such as Josh Gibson and Willard Brown. The first Puerto Rican signed to a major league contract was Hiram Bithorn and ironically, my father considered him a minor talent. Everything is timing and it seems my father was born a little too early!”

January 31, 2014

On July 6, 1947, a brief Associated Press item in the Portland Oregonian reported that “Another Negro” had joined organized baseball:

(Oregonian, July 6, 1947, p. 33)

The Rockford (Illinois) Morning Star (and a number of other newspapers) printed a slightly longer version of the story, which left out the explicit identification of Sostre as “Negro” (though it still noted he had played in the Negro National League). The Chicago Defender, one of the major African American papers, reprinted the story in its July 19 issue; the Defender’s interest tends to imply a belief that Sostre was black.

The AP article also pointed out that he had been signed by the Los Angeles Angels, a Chicago Cubs farm club, the previous year, 1946—the same year the Brooklyn Dodgers became the first organization to sign (openly) black players in the modern era. In fact, looking back at 1946, you’d have to wonder why Sostre joining the Cubs organization was not a bigger story. His signing was announced in February, 1946. This would have made Francisco Sostre (unless I’m missing somebody) the third black player signed by a major league organization in the modern era, after Jackie Robinson (October 1945) and John Wright (November 1945).

Sostre joined the Angels on March 1, 1946, and first appeared in an intrasquad game on March 2. His minor league career was rocky from the start. I’m not sure if he ever played in a game for the Angels—he doesn’t appear in the official statistics, so if he did pitch for them it wasn’t much. On April 24 a ball hit him in the face during batting practice before a doubleheader with Oakland and broke his nose. Then apparently he failed to show up for a game when he was scheduled to pitch, and the Angels immediately farmed him out to the Tacoma Tigers of the Class B Western International League. In his first start he pitched a three-hit shutout, but cooled off after that, winding up with a 7-9 record and a 4.88 ERA.

After spending the off-season in his native Puerto Rican Winter League (where he had been pitching since 1943/44), Sostre was sent by the Cubs organization to Fayetteville of the Class B Tri-State League. Again I’m not sure if he ever pitched for the team, or if he did he pitched very little, as he doesn’t appear in the statistics. On May 28, 1947, the Sporting News reported that he had been placed on the inactive list per his own request; he said he had “a sore arm as a result of pitching all winter.”

The next time he appears in the news (that I’ve found) is the July 6 announcement of his signing with the Stamford Bombers of the Colonial League (another Class B circuit). According to the AP article posted above, he had been with the New York Cubans of the Negro National League. I haven’t found any other evidence that he played for the Cubans.

The Bombers picked that July to begin dipping heavily into the newly opened market for African American talent. First they signed a young unknown, Johnny “Schoolboy” Haith, a 19-year-old from Albany, New York, who apparently had little or no professional experience. After he walked nine batters in a 10 to 1 loss, he was let go; and lefthander Roy Lee, Jr., of the Durham (N.C.) Eagles was signed. In August they brought in Black Yankees right hander Al Preston and three former Atlanta Black Crackers: pitchers Freddie Shepard (or Shepherd) and Andrés Pulliza, and infielder Carlos Santiago. The last two were black Puerto Ricans.

The team’s catcher that year, Jim McGreal, would later pen an article for the SABR Baseball Research Journal about the 1947 Stamford Bombers. Interestingly, he counted Haith, Lee, Preston, Shepherd, Pulliza, and Santiago as the Bombers’ six black players. Here’s the important thing: he mentions Sostre, but doesn’t seem to have regarded him as black.

Going back to 1946, neither did anyone else. When he was first signed by the Angels, the Los Angeles Times (February 3, 1946, A5) described him only as “a Puerto Rican who was taken on, sight unseen, on the recommendation of Hi Bithorn, Cub twirler.” Checking census records from Puerto Rico, Sostre and his family are always listed as “blanco,” or white. If it’s true that he played (however briefly) for the New York Cubans in 1947, that would be interesting, but hardly proof of racial identity. Sure, in the 1940s it would have been unusual for a white player to show up with the Cubans, but in the 1920s several white Latin American (Cuban) players appeared in both the Negro leagues and organized baseball.

So in the end, Sostre wasn’t a forgotten pioneer (except in the sense of being one of the earliest Puerto Ricans in organized baseball); the 1947 reports that he was black were almost certainly in error, a conclusion wrongly drawn from his association with the Negro National League.

The SABR Minor League Database, available at Baseball-Reference.com, has almost no biographical information on Sostre, only a putative birth year of 1922. This profile at the Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, Sports Hall of Fame fills in quite a few details, many of which I’ve been able to confirm in census and Social Security records. Francisco Sostre Morales was born in Yabucoa on March 9, 1918, and he died there on December 15, 1984. Yabucoa also boasts a Calle Francisco Sostre, though I can’t be certain it’s actually named after him (he wasn’t the only Francisco Sostre ever to live there).

September 30, 2009

Scott Simkus has posted another great piece of research on the record of Negro league teams versus lower-lower minor league teams. This one examines the performances of the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords against the Middle Atlantic League and Pennsylvania State Association, both Class C, from 1927 to 1937.

I think you can’t overestimate the importance of this and earlier studies by Scott, especially this one, which shows the relative success of major league and Negro league teams against teams of various minor league levels (in addition to semipro clubs). Such games are commonly dismissed as “meaningless” exhibitions, yet when you put together large numbers of them, unmistakable patterns begin to emerge. This argues for the ultimate usefulness of all games in studying Negro league and semipro players and relating them to their counterparts in organized baseball.

We haven’t come close to collecting and processing the full range of available data still hidden in hundreds of pre-war newspapers. But Scott’s work points the way and shows that the labor will definitely one day be worth it.

May 5, 2009

Louis Castro was not the only early twentieth-century baseball figure with Colombian origins. The Long Branch Cubans, who played in minor leagues and independently from 1913 to 1916, were owned by a New York physician named Carlos Louis Henriquez, and managed by his brother, Richard Anthony Henriquez (pictured right), also the team’s first baseman in 1913 and 1914.

Aside from Long Branch, the Cubans also based themselves at various times in Newark, Jersey City, Poughkeepsie, Harlem, and Newton, New Jersey. Especially when they were in Long Branch, a seaside resort town, they played a large number of exhibitions against major league teams, according to David Skinner compiling a record of 10-24 in these games. Most significantly, they helped funnel a number of players, including Adolfo Luque and Mike González, from the Cuban League to U.S. organized baseball.

Although the Henriquez brothers were usually assumed to be Cuban themselves, a number of records show a Colombian connection. In June 1886, about ten months after “Master Louis Castro” and his father Néstor arrived in New York, another family arrived on board the S.S. Niagara from Colombia (via Mexico and Cuba):

The family remained in the United States, appearing in the 1900 census, where the father, Louis N. Henriquez, and children are all born in the “U.S. of Columbia”; the children’s mother, who had passed away by now (Louis is widowed) is shown as born in Cuba.

In the 1910 census the brothers, both married now, are living together on W. 88th Street, the same address later given on some passenger lists by Long Branch Cubans players. Both give Colombia as their birthplace.

They filled out draft cards in 1918, only two years removed from the demise of the Long Branch Cubans. Unfortunately their cards did not ask for birth place. Both checked the space under “Citizen by Father’s Naturalization before Registrant’s Majority,” although Richard seems to have also written, below that, that he is a citizen of Colombia.

Both appeared in the 1920 census, Carlos as “Dr. Carl Henriquez,” listed for the first time as born in Cuba (his parents in South America). Richard’s census entry, on the other hand, is consistent with earlier records, showing born in South America, his father in South America and mother in Cuba). Both of Richard’s sons, one ten years old, the other “6 2/12” (to my eyes; Ancestry.com has recorded his age as 2 9/12), are listed as born in New Jersey.

The last sign of either brother I’ve found so far is Carlos in the 1930 census, living with in Yonkers, listing his employment as “none,” and supposedly born in New York. The names of his wife (“Jeannette”), son (“Carlo” or “Carlos”) and his mother-in-law, Cora Long, establish this as Carlos Henriquez. His name, however, is oddly given as “Henry Carlos Henriquez,” a strong indication that the information here is probably not entirely trustworthy.

The image of Richard Henriquez above is courtesy of David Skinner, but don’t blame him for the poor quality; I lifted it from a photocopied handout for his presentation on the L.B. Cubans.

April 30, 2009

You have probably heard of Louis Castro, the Philadelphia Athletics’ second baseman and graduate of Manhattan College who briefly replaced Nap Lajoie in 1902 when Lajoie was moved to Cleveland as part of the war with the National League. Recently a debate has raged about whether Castro was born in Colombia (which would make him the first native of a Latin American country to appear in the major leagues since Esteban Bellán in 1873) or in New York City.

Castro, it turns out, led an interesting life quite apart from the question of his place of birth. Personable and eloquent, he eventually became known as something of a baseball comedian. He was nicknamed at first “Judge” (which mutated into “Jud” at some point); as a minor leaguer he was known as “Count Castro.” At a postseason banquet in 1902, the Athletics players were each presented with a special watch fob in commemoration of the team’s American League pennant. Despite having been a mediocre rookie who had only played parts of the year, Castro was chosen to give “a short speech of acceptance” on behalf of the players. He also “sang a Spanish song,” and “on behalf of his fellow-players, crowned [Rube] Waddell with flowers from the table as ‘king of pitchers’, an honor which Waddell accepted blushingly but gracefully” (Sporting Life, October 11, 1902).

After 1902 Castro continued to play in the minors for a number of years. In 1907 he took a job as an undertaker in Atlanta, and apparently continued to do off-season mortuary work over the next few years while still playing ball in the summer. He became a boxing promoter in the 1910s and in 1921 headed a Rhode Island group that wanted to buy Jersey City’s International League club and move it to Providence. In the 1930 census, at the age of 52, he’s listed as a “Ball Player”; this most likely points to work as a semi-pro manager or promoter, though I haven’t been able to substantiate that.

During his career he was always understood to have been born in Colombia (or sometimes Venezuela); most famously, he was frequently said to be the nephew or cousin (or even son) of Cipriano Castro, the president of Venezuela at the time, who had extensive familial and business connections to Colombia. Baseball reference books accepted his Colombian birth until 2001, when Dick Beverage found Castro’s file at the Association of Professional Ball Players of America, dating from the late 1930s, in which Louis Castro gives his birthplace as New York City. Combined with his 1941 death certificate and a 1930 census entry, this led SABR’s Biographical Committee to decide he had been born in New York. For some, the change removed Castro’s status as a pioneering Latin player, although Castro was undoubtedly perceived and treated as Latino during his career, regardless of the actual facts of his birth.

Anyway, the consensus, led by the work of Nick Martinez, Leo Landino, Gilberto Garcia (“Louis ‘Count’ Castro: The Story of a Forgotten Latino Major Leaguer,” Nine 16:2 [2008], pp. 35-51), Adrian Burgos (Playing America’s Game, pp. 85-86), and an archivist from Manhattan College whose name I unfortunately don’t have at the moment, seems to have swung back in the direction of a Colombian birth for Castro. This in my opinion certainly fits the evidence best. A quick summary:

--A passenger list for the ship Colón, arriving in New York from Aspinwall, Colombia (now Colón, Panama), on October 14, 1885, which includes Louis Castro, 8, citizen of the “United States of Colombia,” traveling with his father N. Castro, 50, a banker (Leo Landino posted the passenger list, originally found by Nick Martinez);

--Manhattan College records from the 1890s showing Castro’s father’s address as Medellín, Colombia, though Garcia notes that some of these records also indicate that Castro was born in Venezuela;

--A biographical sketch in Sporting Life (October 4, 1902, p. 5) that says Castro “was born in the United States of Colombia, in 1877”;

--Numerous press reports, from ca. 1903 to as late as 1914, that Castro was the nephew, cousin, or son of Venezuelan president Cipriano Castro, which sometimes also state that Castro was himself Venezuelan;

(Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1904, p. B4)

--The 1910 U.S. census, showing Louis M. Castro, a 33-year-old undertaker living in Atlanta, born (like his parents) in “Medellin U.S. Col.,” which is crossed out with “So. America Spanish” written above it.

--A passenger list for the ship Vandyck, arriving in New York from Rio de Janeiro on April 11, 1922, showing a Louis Castro, 45, married, born November 25, 1876, in New York City.

--The 1930 U.S. census, which shows Louis Castro, 51, “Ball Player, Base Ball Team,” born in New York and living in Queens.

--Castro’s file, Association of Professional Ball Players of America, late 1930s, showing him born in New York.

--His 1941 death certificate, also showing Castro born in New York.

Note that from 1886 through 1914 or so Castro was said in every press notice or official record to be from Colombia (or in some instances Venezuela). According to his entry in the 1910 census he was an alien, not a citizen of the United States.

However, from 1922 until his death the records we have all show him born in New York. It could be that Castro at some point discovered the truth about his origins. The above chronology would suggest that this epiphany, if it occurred, must have taken place sometime in the late 1910s or early 1920s.

But I have found a document, one I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere, that might better explain why Castro might have switched his birthplace from Medellín to New York later in his life. It’s his passport application, dated January 30, 1922. It shows Louis Castro, born in New York on November 25, 1876 (providing affidavits by two people to this effect), and claiming never to have been outside the United States. Castro also says that his father, Nestor Castro, deceased, was born in New York.

(click to enlarge)

Castro gives his employment as “salesman,” gives us the name of the ship (the Van Dyck) upon whose passenger list he later appears (see above), and lists the countries he plans to visit: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Jamaica. He lists the “object” of his visit as “travel,” so it’s unclear whether or not this is a business trip of some sort. For what it’s worth, there doesn’t seem to be a passport application on file for his wife, Margaret, which might tend to indicate the trip was for business.

If Castro indeed came to the United States as an eight-year-old youngster, and if his father returned to Colombia (as it seems the Manhattan College records suggest), it’s possible Louis was never naturalized. If he didn’t leave the United States from 1886 to 1922, the issue of his birth and citizenship might never have come up. But when he did leave, it became necessary to obtain travel documents. He applied for a U.S. passport on January 30, 1922, and gave the date of his departure as February 4, so it was either a relatively unexpected trip, or he had left everything until the last minute. Either way, he needed the passport quickly.

Even without that complication, it might have been quite difficult to obtain documents from Colombia after having been absent for 35 years. Castro’s father was dead, and perhaps he had fallen out of touch with his family there. In any event, it was doubtless much easier to find a couple of friends to swear to his birth in the United States than to do whatever he would have had to do to get a Colombian passport. What I want to suggest is that Louis Castro may have simply decided to claim he was born in the United States as a bureaucratic expediency. He then adopted that fiction for all official purposes for the rest of his life.

Another crucial source needs to be examined. There is a World War I draft card for “Lou Castro,” born November 25, 1877, and living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, the form he used did not ask for birth place, and worse, the card’s image is missing from Ancestry.com’s digitization (and presumably the original microfilm), so we can’t check any other information that might be on it, such as his occupation, employer, nearest relative, and, most crucially, his citizenship status (alien, naturalized U.S. citizen, or native-born citizen). If anyone wants to examine the actual, physical card in whichever National Archives branch has it, it is supposed to be in Roll 1907607, Draft Board 7, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

April 14, 2009

By the way: this guy (“Ramon Herrara”) is Ramón Herrera. Herrera actually started the 1922 season on the Bridgeport Americans, also of the Eastern League, alongside Cuban Hall of Famer Joseíto Rodríguez, though it evidently didn’t show up in the guides. He must have played very little with Bridgeport (fewer than ten games) before moving to Springfield.

Herrera and Claudio Manela thus joined the Eastern League from the Negro National League at the same time, though Manela didn’t stick. Both were nicknamed “Mike,” for whatever reason. (At least Mike González was actually named Miguel.)

December 22, 2007

On December 21, [1879,] an American team named the Hop Bitters, headed by Cincinnati promoter Frank Bancroft, visited Havana and easily disposed of a Cuban squad that scored a single run by Carlos Zaldo, who got on base following a successful bunt, the first native player to master this particular craft.

In Cuba the team was indeed promoted as the “Hop Bitters,” a name usually associated with Rochester, New York. And in fact the trip appears to have been financed by a “Mr. Soule of Rochester, N.Y.” (New York Clipper, November 29, 1879). But it turns out that Bancroft’s team was really, as the Clipper remarked in its November 29 issue, “composed entirely of the Worcesters of 1880”—that is, the Worcester, Massachusetts, club of the (minor) National Association of 1879, with the players they intended to use the following season. The Worcesters joined the National League for the 1880 season, and would play there through 1882 (they are called in all the reference books the “Worcester Ruby Legs,” though I’m not sure how prevalent that nickname was at the time); so the nine that visited Cuba in 1879 was, if not technically a “major league” club, practically one. The latest standings I could find for the 1879 NA shows the Worcesters at fourth place of nine clubs with a 19-23 record. In 1880 they would fare about the same in the NL, at 40-43 and fifth (though with Lee Richmond and Fred Corey added on the mound, and Harry Stovey in the outfield). The roster is listed in the Clipper (November 22, 1879); here is the passenger manifest for their return to the United States, arriving at New Orleans on December 31:

Seven of these players (all but Foley, who would go to Boston, and Nichols, who would only pitch two games for Worcester) would be regulars for Worcester in 1880.

The trip was not a financial success. As far as I can tell, they ended playing only two games in Cuba, spending the rest of the winter in New Orleans. This piece, from the Clipper (January 3, 1880), explains it from the American point of view:

It’s important to remember that the United States had made several attempts to acquire Cuba, most recently offering to purchase the island in 1869, just after the Ten Years’ War, a Cuban rebellion, had begun. Baseball, probably considered a symbol and symptom of U.S. subversion, was banned by Spanish authorities in that same year (though the ban was apparently flouted often, or only intermittently enforced). In 1873, war had nearly broken out between the United States and Spain over the “Virginius Affair,” a Bay of Pigs-like incident involving an American-manned ship caught attempting to smuggle arms, ammunition, revolutionary leaders, and about 100 soldiers into Cuba (you will be hearing more about this soon). When the Worcester players visited in 1879, the Ten Years’ War had been over for only a year, and the atmosphere they encountered was surely tense.